Few people write well, despite the fact that our bullshit testing system (SAT, ACT, what-have-you) gives good scores to the well-nigh illiterate. Fuck, *I* don't write well -- my text is as purple as Lowtax's head after an Uwe-style pounding, and my grammar is at best inconsistent.
English courses need to get out of the touchy-feely everyone's-a-winner lowlights and into the harsh day of the old-school grammar nazi regimen. Yes, yes, you don't need flawless grammar and spelling to be understood -- and I'm thankful for that -- but kids ALSO need to get the basics beat into their heads early on. Language isn't about simple communication. If your only style is "borderline illiterate" as it is for most of the internet, you aren't really communicating well at ALL. Mastering grammar and spelling DOES in fact allow you to express yourself better -- and I don't mean vocabulary specifically, but rather style and structure and syntax -- and it enables you to be quite a bit more, well, protean in any context where a change in style is necessary.
Jotaro pumps out the big words and neologisms en masse, but what he doesn't have is style. His posts are always the same jumbled, confused mass of hyperextended syntax and odd word choices, although I notice he's been trying to stick a few "American" idioms in the whole gumbo lately. He's like Kitsune, minus the self-confidence and the threats to skin your pets alive if you don't like some obscure Japanese roguelike. Like Kitsune, though, English is a second language for both of them, but that doesn't excuse the mangled semantics -- I knew a Swedish dude who wrote English better than I did as his THIRD or FOURTH language. (Can't imagine what he wrote like in his native tongue.) The only difference was that he didn't try to call attention to himself, since he had complete confidence in his mad language skillz, or whatever.
